Friday, January 13, 2012

You don't get to drive - part three

In the recent installments we've looked at software development as a discipline that has its own way of working. Its history, however brief, didn't leave any room for being mistaken with anything else. It is the single, most dynamic part of our modern society. But how do people handle it?

If you're young, in Poland it'd be under 18 years old, you don't technically get to drive a car without adult supervision. That's pure theory nowadays but at least that's how it should be. Being young and funky gets lots of stupid ideas into your head like driving over 100km/h in town chasing a friend without knowing the road ahead. Been there, done that. It doesn't mean I was in my right mind when I did it.

There are places where being wild is good. Certainly things where life is at stake are not the kind of ones where you'd expect one to go all in without training but that's what is actually happening all the time. People (including me) are by definition reckless and unpredictable and nothing is going to change that. There's a reason for that: had we been reasonable all the time no big discoveries would have happened. We wouldn't know about the continents of America, we most probably wouldn't know that radiation is actually bad and finally we'd probably die of hunger had there been no brave hunters risking their lives to master hunting animals.

In today's modern world however we do have the opportunity to make less mistakes - at least less of those obvious ones. And with that let me present you with a definition of two words in German:

Verfügen über - to have the knowledge about something, used in the sense "I do have a driving license"

Beherrschen - to have the ability to do something, used in the sense "I do know how to drive a car"

With those two there's little difference, right? Usually if you do have a driving license you should be capable enough to drive a car. But can you? Is that really what is going on?

Let's try to apply that to software development for a moment. It is obvious you need to study to get the diploma to be a software developer. But does it mean you can do software with it? Can you actually make a living with it? As it turns out yes, you can. The discipline is so vast and by all means so naively taken by so many companies that the moment you step out of school you're ready to go, hot shot! You are the man with the skills. But are you?

In my experience with young graduates and with students it was seldom the case when a young developer right after school was really ready to go. Actually I know only two people that when they came to work at a company with me I felt respect for the wealth of knowledge and humility for things they don't know. And so far it was just the two people I know this far that were open to the suggestion to learn new stuff. There's been sooo many cases where the lack of will to learn new technical skills was demonstrated along with arrogance (not to be confused with confidence) I couldn't even count.

The worst thing about it is they really do get hired! And believe me when I say there are companies where a fresh graduate hired almost off-the-shelve gets the ability to flush the project they are working on literally down the toilette. That means a very young in terms of experience person gets commit access to software that costs hundreds, sometimes even millions of dollars! And we're not talking sporadically - it's how certain companies operate! There's a saying that "there's no person that can't be replaced with a finite number of students". That's how the new markets for software developers came to be.

Obviously in every rule there are exceptions. I know that in the area there are maybe 15%-25% people that really get what software development is all about. And that's actually a very good ratio considering that software development has been announced one of the best paid jobs for graduates and is also viewed as one of the easiest ones in terms of rules.

Yes, rules... What kind of rules are there?

Among those professions I just mentioned there's an MD and a lawyer. Once you're done with your study you don't get to cut-open anybody for any reason, right? You need to gain practice under a trained eye of someone with that experience already there. Otherwise nobody would trust you with a knife doing god knows what to the body of a living soul! Same thing with lawyers. I hope you catch my drift here.

But is it like this with software developers? Do they need to undergo a practice to get certified as software developers that can cut-open (refactor), create and destroy (god-like powers) and provide real value to customers earning big big money for their employers? I think not. I'm sure there are companies that do tend to forbid new hires (freshly out of school or not) to commit anything until they have been long enough with the company to get what they are doing. But it's not always the case. They are hired to do the job, to be resources, not engineers. They are just numbers that mostly do not add up. But there's hope that not everyone is as mad in their doing as the ones I've just mentioned. There's the opensource community that follows exactly the kind of path that it should. You start small, familiarize yourself with the code, maybe submit a patch or two, become a contributor first, gain the trust of other team members and finally if you prove yourself worthy you get the commit access. By the time you get it you'd do harsh things to people for causing harm to the project. I wonder why people do put the information about being a commiter to some opensource project on their CV.. Interesting, isn't it?

More than anything else one needs to remember that software development is about learning and practicing. It's not always something new you need to learn. A lot of times it is something really, really old. Without knowing and above all without practicing it is not possible to "beherrschen" something. Nobody was born with the ability to drive an F1 car. You might "feel it" but you need to train to be good at it. You do need to get your hands dirty!

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About Me

I'm a passionate software developer with more than 15 years of experience in creating and maintaining several key software solutions. Wherever I go I spreads the word about new and updated means to satisfy the ever growing need for solving business problems.